advertising campaigns.
Company: Hippo Inc.
Owner: Martin Gleitsman
Type of business: Audio-production company
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Location: 27 Bank St., Warwick
Employees: 2
Annual revenue: Approximately $100,000
You may not realize it, but chances are you’ve heard of Martin Gleitsman.
Or at least you’ve heard his voice. Perhaps it was back a few years ago, when the pizza chain Ronzio’s was running its ad campaign featuring the “pizza fairy.”
That was Gleitsman’s voice.
“I pictured a guy with thick curly hair on his back and wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, but with wings sprouting out, flying around leaving pizzas under people’s pillows,” said Gleitsman, the owner of Hippo Inc., a Warwick-based sound production studio.
Gleitsman, whose firm caters mostly to advertising agencies and ad copywriters, is the man responsible for many of the booming voices, burps, tweets, knocks, violin flourishes, clucks and yuks that are featured in so many radio advertisements.
His career is proof that some people really do the jobs they tell grownups they’ll do when they grow up. Gleitsman first fell in love with radio as a child in the 1950s. He would fake being sick to stay home, tune in the tube radio in his bedroom on 66th and Madison, and listen to soaps and adventure programs like “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon,” “Don MacNeil’s Breakfast Club” and “The Lone Ranger.”
In the 1960s, while attending Columbia University, Gleitsman became the chief announcer of the college radio station, WKCR-FM.
Then Gleitsman moved to Maine. It was the ’70s. He offers no other explanation.
He went to work as an announcer at WDCS-FM in Portland, where he acquired engineering skills turning out spots for the station’s sponsors.
In 1974, Gleitsman decided that making ads was more fun than being on the air, so he and a friend from the station started a small recording studio called Reel to Real. The studio served the advertising and audiovisual communities of northern New England and grew with them, said Gleitsman. By the late 1980s, he had eight employees and responsibility for a studio complex called Megaphone, which included a room big enough to hold a chamber orchestra.
In 1993, Gleitsman moved to Rhode Island and started Hippo, which now operates out of a sound production studio built on the ground floor of Gleitsman’s 1760s-era farmhouse in Warwick’s Pawtuxet Village. Gleitsman’s wife, the only other employee of Hippo Inc., mostly keeps the books and crunches the numbers upstairs, he said.
Hippo scores a surprising amount of big-time clients for a two-person firm based at home. Gleitsman’s Telos Zephyr ISDN co-deck, which can transmit and record broadcast-quality audio in real time anywhere in the world, allows him to produce audio spots for clients across the country, including ABC Family, National Public Radio and USA Network’s The Sci Fi Channel.
Locally, Hippo works with local ad agency mainstays such as RDW Group, Creative Justice and Cornerstone Communications, producing radio spots for clients that include the University of Rhode Island, Gem Plumbing, the Providence Teachers Union, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Rhode Island, First Night Providence, Frugal Fanny, Lifespan, Sovereign Bank, Newport Creamery – and of course Ronzio’s.
Jay Leno recently included a mention in his monologue of a Gem Plumbing radio advertisement that Gleitsman engineered and produced. The spot, about sweet-smelling plumbers, has a campy retro sound – Ozzy and Harriett gone haywire in modern America, breaking pipes and sniffing a burly man’s blue collar as he bends, wrench in hand, into a gushing main.
The 60-second spot, which took six hours to make, clearly delights Gleitsman still, and he reveled as he played it, pointing out a musical flourish and a twittering-bird sound that he was especially proud of.
Now inspired, Gleitsman waxed nostalgic for the old days, when sound effects were produced with, well, produce. He recalled his younger days in the late 1960s, when days when he and a group of friends produced, directed and acted in a drama series called “The Radio” for WBAI-FM, the Pacifica affiliate in New York City.
“We had to do sound effects for a scene where a guy gets pushed out of a window, falls through a store awning and smacks the ground, and we had to do it in real time – the opening of the window, the whoosh of air, the tearing of canvas, the body hitting the cement,” Gleitsman recalled. The sound was ultimately achieved with a laundry bag filled with wet clothes, a cabbage and stalk of celery that was rent in two at just the moment that the imagined body hit the cement, conjuring the breaking of bones.
“It worked. It was a really horrifying sound,” Gleitsman said with glee.
Today producing sound effects is a bit easier; Gleitsman has a sound effects library on MP3 discs. But he still has the same attention to auditory detail and the same passion for unique noises – often he carries portable Dat machine and microphone when he goes out.
Gleitsman said he has consciously kept Hippo small, refusing to add employees even at the expense of increasing his income.
“I’m not by nature a manager. I’m very hands-on, and stepping back and letting
other people do it never really suited me. I’ve got friends making more money,
but they’re not doing what they got into this business to do, and they’re miserable,”
he said, and smiled.
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